Snark Remarks

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Haiti is an amazing country. Sure, it is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. But that is not the fault of the brave and generous Haitian people.

Haiti was formerly one of the most brutal French plantation colonies. Some of the planters there were monsters of sadism and depravity. Read the history.

The rum and sugar trade was so lucrative that it was much cheaper to buy more slaves than to take care of the current batch of Africans. So the plantation owners/managers just worked them to death and bought more.

Besides the obvious cruelty and inhumanity of that practice, there was another drawback. Eventually all the relatively docile peasant farmers who had made the plantations such a success were all used up. In West Africa the European slavers then fomented wars among the tribes and bought the resulting captives as slaves.

These later slaves were mostly highly trained and experienced warriors and sometimes shamans or other spiritual leaders, adept in magic, martial arts, espionage, and other practices. Those were valuable leaders and valuable skills for, say, a revolution.

They escaped by the dozens off the crowded docks of Port au Prince and disappeared into the rugged mountains of Haiti. There they joined forces with former enemies from West Africa and a few tough remnants of the indigenous Indians and formed a formidable fighting force.

They were able to infiltrate the plantations to pass information and coordinate a successful revolution in 1791 against the brutal plantation system in Haiti that was so very profitable for France.

Napoleon sent troops. The Haitians defeated them.

The Spanish sent troops. Ditto.

The successful revolution in Haiti is said to be one reason that Napoleon sold the Louisiana Purchase to Thomas Jefferson in 1803.

When Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of South America, lost his first revolution, the Haitians took him in. They outfitted a new army for him. The only obligation? He must abolish slavery in every country he freed.

The U.S. was still 60 years from even nominally abolishing slavery. A black democracy only a short sail from U.S. shores? Unthinkable! Not to be tolerated.

In (I think) the 1830s France sent an armada of powerful gunboats to blockade the coastal cities of Haiti, threatening to destroy all the coastal towns (at great loss of life) if the government of the fledgling democracy did not agree to pay “reparations” to France for freeing themselves from slavery.

The French forced the Haitians to pay virtually their whole national income to France till the end of the 19th century. Do not criticize Haiti for being a backward country. All the money that should have been used to build roads, schools, universities, hospitals, and other infrastructure had to be paid to the French for generations.

But wait, there is more: The United States of America has invaded tiny Haiti 13 times!

Throughout the 20th century we repeatedly deposed democratically elected presidents of Haiti who stood up for the Haitian people against U.S. corporate interests. We imposed and supported brutal dictatorships.

Popular, democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted by the CIA under President Clinton and exiled from Haiti for 3 years. When he came back, he was reelected.

The U.S. kidnapped him at gunpoint under President Bush and held him incommunicado in Central Africa for weeks. The Bush government threatened the President of Jamaica with similar treatment for offering sanctuary to the Haitian president and his family.

So do not blame the Haitians for their predicament. The U.S. and France put them in the position they are currently in. Only Venezuela, Cuba, and a handful of other countries freed by Bolivar have ever stood up for them.

We owe the Haitians our support for the movement to insist that the French repay the so-called “reparations” they extorted from Haiti at gunpoint in the 19th Century.

America owes the Haitians help and monetary aid now to make up abusing them in the past. And because they need help as our fellow human beings and near neighbors in the New World.

When it gets right down too it, we also owe the Haitians for a huge chunk of middle America—from Louisiana to Idaho—known as the Louisiana Purchase.

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